Robotic systems are commonly used to perform surgical procedures and typically include a robot comprising a robotic arm and a tool coupled to an end of the robotic arm for engaging a surgical site. Often, a tracking system, such as optical localization, is utilized to track positioning of the robot and the surgical site. Kinematic data from the robot may be aggregated with data from the tracking system to update positioning of the robot or for redundant position detection. Tracking systems often track the robot at much higher speeds than the robot can respond. This high speed tracking data is often unsuitable to be utilized directly by the robot, due to both noise and control system stability issues. In many cases, low-pass filtering is used to reduce the noise levels, which improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the commands given to the robot and results in smoother movement and improved performance of the robot arm. In addition, since the tracking system measurement of the tool is part of an outer positioning loop, it is important to not close this outer loop at a higher bandwidth than the robot is capable of responding. The aforementioned low-pass filter also serves this purpose as a control system compensator, effectively lowering the bandwidth of the outer loop to that needed to ensure stable performance. As a result, updating position of the robot based on data from the tracking system has delays due to the filtering of the data.
Although such systems may update the steady state positioning or detect static positioning errors using this technique, such systems are not equipped to determine whether errors or loss of system accuracy has occurred in the system in real time. Instead, such techniques detect errors only after data from the tracking system is filtered or compensated based on control needs of the robot. In other words, any detection of errors in such systems is delayed. Such delay in detecting errors may result in damage to the system or the surgical site, even if such delay is merely hundreds of milliseconds.
As such, there is a need in the art for systems and methods for addressing at least the aforementioned problems.